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Asana S-1

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Re: Asana S-1

#241

Post by peter_l_downs »

ummonk wrote: post #81
peter_l_downs wrote: post #19

Am I reading this correctly in that they had a net loss in 2019 of $50.1 (42.4 adjusted) million dollars, and then in 2020 a net loss of $118.6 (68.2 adjusted) million dollars? (bottom of page 58) And that their plan is to just continue trying to upsell and acquire new customers? Hmmmm

Sales and marketing and R&D fuel rapid growth. This should be maintained until growth nears its ceiling and the company starts encountering diminishing returns on investment in growth.

That makes sense, thank you.

Re: Asana S-1

#242

Post by IndexPointer »

phaedryx wrote: post #86
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costs a lot of money to build your own programming language and then throw it out. https://blog.asana.com/2017/08/performance-asana-app-rewrite...

"Our founding engineers had learned from their experience working at Google and Facebook that to ensure a performant and stable application, they would need to build their own framework" Wow. Interesting.

That was in 2009 apparently. Maybe it made sense then.

Re: Asana S-1

#243

Post by dbtc »

eru wrote: post #199
dbtc wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those downsides could also be considered upsides from a certain perspective: More work, more jobs; the industry grows.

Whose perspective is that, though? Individual companies don't benefit from low productivity, and neither does the economy as a whole.

I think at least a segment of (an, The?) economy grows from some kinds of unproductive churning. Maybe it depends how you define productive. I'd argue that gambling or gaming are not productive even though they are lucrative for some and fun for many.

Re: Asana S-1

#244

Post by dbtc »

manquer wrote: post #177
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) to figure out how to attach PDFs and videos to tickets, and email people when there's a change in status? As with most of these companies, user-facing feature development is only a small part of the engineering workload. I would assume the majority of those engineers are working on less visible tasks: Devops, build systems, infrastructure monitoring, security, bac…

This is common reason cited . I don’t disagree as such, as my own product grows I see it happening . However I am not sure how much is strictly necessary . I honestly think a small team could achieve lot more . You loose the agility of smaller team at >50 have large company problems without the benefit of sheer manpower 500-1000 typically brings. Scaling devops is not as hard as it sounds . There are plenty of cloud…

What do you think drives the unnecessary growth?

Re: Asana S-1

#245

Post by eru »

dbtc wrote: post #243
eru wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whose perspective is that, though? Individual companies don't benefit from low productivity, and neither does the economy as a whole.

I think at least a segment of (an, The?) economy grows from some kinds of unproductive churning. Maybe it depends how you define productive. I'd argue that gambling or gaming are not productive even though they are lucrative for some and fun for many.

Well, now we are getting into philosophical territory.

As a simple example, watching a movie doesn't produce anything, but it does give people joy. Similarly, eating anything tastier than the bare minimum gruel to keep you alive and healthy mostly just gives you extra joy.

Orthodox economics is perfectly fine with that. They deal in 'utility'. Fun is a perfectly fine product to deliver.

So eg gambling or playing the lottery can be perfectly rational, as long as you are aware that you are doing it for the entertainment value, and not as a financial investment.

Now for our situation: I hold that the extra work here doesn't provide any net gain in utility. Not even for people who like programming: there's enough other programming work left that's not just churn and that's not any less enjoyable.

Of course, the humble agnostic choice of orthodox economics is not the only possible one. If you are some kind of puritan or a paperclip maximizer, you'll know for a fact that producing fun is not productive. Only paperclips count (or whatever puritans optimise for).

Re: Asana S-1

#246

Post by Aeolun »

maximente wrote: post #24
Aeolun wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only labor I exploit is my own.

my guess is that a detailed account of the consumer goods you have purchased - including possibly the device upon which you typed out and submitted this comment to this web property - would indicate otherwise

Maybe I should have have indicated that no other directly exploitative relationships exist.

Re: Asana S-1

#247

Post by molsongolden »

user5994461 wrote: post #99
gizmo wrote: post #35

According to the filing Asana has 1.2m paying users. Each user is worth maybe $1000. That puts Asana at 1.2bn. The median forward revenue multiple for public enterprise SaaS companies is 10x, and with 2020 revenues of 150mn that results in a 3bn market cap. A third data point is they raised 75M 16 months ago at a $900m post money valuation. With growth at 100% annually that puts their current valuation at 2.5bn or so…

Their business plan is $30 a month, so I'm tempted to say each paying user is definitely not worth $1000. Given their revenues of 142M and 1.2M paid users, that's an average a tad below $120 a year per user, which would actually be less than their cheapest plan. That doesn't add up, it smells of free trials counted as paid users.

Trying to calculate revenue per user in this way assumes that they started the year with 1.2M paid users.

Napkin math, assuming the user acquisition was evenly distributed throughout the year, came out to maybe $160/user.

$1,000 LTV would mean that each user stays a user for ~6 years.

I'm not sure if that's a reasonable assumption or not. Just sharing numbers because I was curious how much the average user might be paying, after seeing the discussion above.

Re: Asana S-1

#248

Post by manquer »

dbtc wrote: post #244
manquer wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is common reason cited . I don’t disagree as such, as my own product grows I see it happening . However I am not sure how much is strictly necessary . I honestly think a small team could achieve lot more . You loose the agility of smaller team at >50 have large company problems without the benefit of sheer manpower 500-1000 typically brings. Scaling devops is not as hard as it sounds . There are plenty of cloud…

What do you think drives the unnecessary growth?

I wouldn't say 'unnecessary' as such, adding people is one way to solve problems just not the only way

It is easier to solve problems by adding more people, especially when financial resources is not a constraint. However like technical debt, process and people debt will keep growing. There are some methods to have handle on it like the Spotify pod model, but no method is the magic bullet.

Every resource you add is additional cost not just on the payroll but also on the work overhead. 2x sized company will not do 2x work after all. At some point the incremental value of new resource is not worth the incremental cost.

I am not sure many startups consciously think this through while scaling up.

Re: Asana S-1

#249

Post by mvkel »

supernova87a wrote: post #16

Wow, this is a torrent of IPOs today. Investors / boards are wanting to get money out before things turn south I feel. Aside from that, I'm surprised how much it costs Asana on engineering R&D, for essentially a ticket management system. How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) to figure out how to attach PDFs and videos to tickets, and email people when there's a change in status? (ok yes I'm oversimplify…

I know it’s hip to assume the market crash is days away, but what makes more sense is: saas companies have proven to be the most resilient type of company in this market. It couldn’t be a more perfect time to IPO.

The reason the market looks so good right now is because tech stocks represent a significant portion of the indices. Many other stock are still way down (appropriately)

Re: Asana S-1

#250

Post by mvkel »

thecupisblue wrote: post #69
supernova87a wrote: post #16

Wow, this is a torrent of IPOs today. Investors / boards are wanting to get money out before things turn south I feel. Aside from that, I'm surprised how much it costs Asana on engineering R&D, for essentially a ticket management system. How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) to figure out how to attach PDFs and videos to tickets, and email people when there's a change in status? (ok yes I'm oversimplify…

IMO this will be one of the failed IPOs of the 2020. I understand (but not approve) 300 devs - they got a ton of integrations, enterprise client handling, lot of mobile, frontend and backend surface area to cover, lots of devops and support, teams to build new features, maintain tooling and so on... given time, any software team will slow down and scale up, unless it is specifically countered by the company. There's…

By this logic, Zoom shouldn’t exist.

Product innovation and quality represent very little of a company’s value. Distribution is where value is derived, and Asana’s distribution is incredible. And their product isn’t bad!

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